| Poem for Friday |
[Dec. 20th, 2002|09:22 am] |
A Visit From The Yule Spirits
by Richard De Angelis
( 'Twas the night before Yule, when all 'cross the heath/
Not a being was stirring, Pagan, faerie, or beast.
)
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A bit of seasonal humor. Being a Jewitch, I have to plan my Christmas day Chinese food and moviegoing.
Which Sean Bean Character Are You?
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Can I ask a question? Is it not allowable for a literate person to have disliked Faramir in TTT and ROTK (the novels)? How come when I state that I do not despise and loathe movie!Faramir but rather respect him, having found Tolkien's Faramir a hopeless do-gooder (and Boromir a revolting buffoon), I get treated as if I must be a brainless 12-year-old with a crush on Legolas?
I understand that some texts are sacrosanct to some people, and any deviation from Tolkien-canon is going to get certain people absolutely hysterical. I thought I might feel that way when I heard TNT was making a four-hour miniseries of The Mists of Avalon, a book that literally changed my religion. And I watched it, and yeah, it utterly decimated what really mattered in the novel, but you know what -- it's a miniseries! It's a piece of commercial entertainment! It's not the definitive version and certainly not the only valid interpretation of MOA, and even if there are 12-year-old fan girls who may have watched it because of a crush on the guy who played Lancelot, maybe they'll read the books, maybe they'll think about the barely-touched-upon history of the Goddess, maybe they'll form their own ideas based on it. Or maybe they'll just have enjoyed it and that'll be enough for them. It's too bad for me that no one can make the definitive miniseries of how *I* see The Mists of Avalon -- at least, it's too bad for me -- but that's not the director's responsibility. It's not an act of sabotage if he decided to focus on different characters and events than I would have.
Peter Jackson had nine hours in which to condense books that probably could have been made into a 20+ hour production and still required cuts. He had to find some way to show quickly Faramir's desperation to do something right in the eyes of his father. And dramatically -- quite apart from Tolkien-purist considerations -- I think it's very powerful seeing him tempted and rejecting the Ring; it strengthens the link to Boromir that's pretty weak without the flashbacks (I know people are ranting about various other changes that could have been replaced with those, but I think that's a different argument, and in any case I don't think it's a make-or-break choice for the film).
I've been a lifelong SF/fantasy fan; I wrote my M.A. thesis on feminist utopias. But although I understood and appreciated his contributions to the genre, I was never a Tolkien fan until Peter Jackson brought to life the human characters whom I never could stand. I don't understand why certain people cannot accept that it is possible for intelligent disagreement on such topics, rather than pronouncing themselves the True Intellectuals [TM] with the only valid opinions. So go ahead and hate movie!Faramir if you want, but for heaven's sake do the rest of us a favor and stop implying that it makes you smarter, deeper or more literate than those of us who don't. |
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